Touch Screen Laptop Computers
Not long ago, before Apple unveiled its latest Apple laptop line we heard many rumors about MacBook Pro’s with multitouch-enabled displays. Now while it sounds great to have an iPhone display on a laptop, it never materialized. The displays would have cost a lot more and consequently so would the Apple Macbooks, although many users would have paid the increased price as an option.
If you want to buy a touch screen laptop you have a couple of choices today but you should be aware of the pros and cons of this type of display. Let's start with the pros.
Advantages Of Using A Touch Screen
If we forget about the price for a moment, these are some pretty cool devices. With a touch screen laptop, you can take notes in your own handwriting or sketch with a stylus. With good handwriting recognition software you can translate both printed and cursive writing into digitized form. Laptops are built to be portable and instead of using a touchpad or mouse, you can use a stylus or your finger to open files, drag & drop, paste and copy, move or resize windows and a lot more.
Sounds useful but there are some critics, and they have a point. First and foremost you should expect to pay more money than you would with a standard laptop and while you could have two computers identical apart from the screen being touchscreen, the price will be very different. You can save money by getting a gadget that will make your laptop’s screen a touchscreen (about $200), but then this is never as good as the real thing. Next, obviously, you'll get fingerprints all over your screen so you should always be prepared to keep your display clean, on a daily basis if possible.
Some Problems With Ease-Of-Use
The real kicker here is useability. The iphone and other touch screen "smart phones" were revolutionary gadgets because the touch interface was put where the hand rested naturally. To say that the next step is to move to laptops may be a big "misstep" according to a few. Why? Because it’s not natural to be touching the screen on a laptop. It’s awkward to do and more importantly it forces the user to remove their hand(s) from where they rest normally. This breaks up the natural flow of things and, for many, it's really uncomfortable to do.
Now the convertible notebooks, like the HP TX2, have screens that can pivot around forming a slate format. This allows for a more useful environment for using a touch interface because in this form the device is being used in the hands. In slate mode these gadgets are sitting in the hands which are naturally over the screen. Even slate form laptops must have a customized user interface that is configured to take special advantage of touch. If touch is just put on top of a standard UI the user will likely find that very little benefit is being gained by touch.
This is what Laptop Magazine determined when they reviewed the HP TX2. Even though this is a multi-touch screen they found that trying to use it in laptop mode was not comfortable: "The touch experience needs work. Aside from the fact that reaching above the keyboard to touch the display wasn’t always comfortable or useful, the display itself wasn’t impressively responsive. For instance, when we used two fingers to zoom in and out of Web pages in Internet Explorer 8, the page looked jerky while resizing, and the response was delayed."
There are many touchscreen laptops on the way, including models like the Hewlett Packard multi-touch Touchsmart tx2, CTL’s 2go Convertible Classmate PC (one of the first touch-enabled netbooks), Dell is adding touch-screen capabilities to certain laptops in 2009, and the Eee PC Touch boasts a nearly 9-inch touch screen. This is a small taste of whats to come. If you think that a touchscreen laptop is for you, just be certain to spend some time "test driving" it before purchasing to make sure that you will really make use of those features that you are certain to pay dearly for.
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